


Somebody's Got to Tell the Tale

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Birds, Brotherly Love, Crossroads, Crossroads Deals & Demons, Crows, Demons, Episode: s03e16 No Rest for the Wicked, Fairy Tale Elements, Hell, Hellhounds, Magic, Plants, Rescue, Sick Sam Winchester, Souls, Spells & Enchantments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 13:13:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3611358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the hellhounds are dead. Or: Dean goes to hell. Sam brings him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somebody's Got to Tell the Tale

**Author's Note:**

> Title from ["Up to Me"](http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/me),  
> Bob Dylan

 

_I know you’re long gone, guess it must be up to me.—Bob Dylan_

 

His back's to the garlanded door and his shoulders are hunched up tight when Dean steps back in out of the stiff Illinois wind. He can hear the plastic bag crinkling over Dean's arm, smell diner grease and prairie earth and, very faintly, showered-off blood.  _All_   _the hellhounds are dead_ , he thinks nonsensically, puts a hand quick to his cheek, to his mouth.

"What's wrong?" Dean says.

"Sick, I think," Sam says, clicks the keyboard, closes the spellbook with a soft snap.

"Like, sick, sick? Fever?"

"Possibly."

Dean's hand comes to rest on the back of Sam's neck, moves down to pat his damp shoulder.

"Go to bed, nerd boy; you're done for the night."

*****

He does. Wakes up later, who knows how much, from a strange dream, with a silver blade, or something like, sticking through one eye, damp sheets, cold chills, Dean sitting next to him with warm, worried eyes. His coat’s torn open, and he smells faintly of ash.

"Hey. Think you were dreaming, and it didn't sound happy.”

Sam's hand goes to his face again, cups the eye.

"Headache?"

"Yeah."

"We'll get you something for that."

Dean holds a couple of cold fingers to his face.

"Hundred and three and change," Dean says, pauses to peer at his pupils, "that needs to come down."

"It’s OK," Sam says, "I didn't take anything."

Dean looks at him, steady and strange. His face is transparent.

"That can be fixed."

Sam swallows something that leaves a sickening cherry-salt film on his tongue, water that tastes of iron, watches as Dean, very far away, lays something dark and cold over his eyes, listens as he talks, about ghosts, about beautiful women, about road signs and shortcuts and prairies and stars. 

Or something like.

*****

Dean strokes his hair.

Dean says something about John.

"I'd do it again," Dean says.

"Go to sleep,” Dean says, whispers in his ear, "and don't look for me."

*****

When the sun comes faint through the motel curtains he wakes gasping under the stiff quilt, eyes crusted with salt, banked fire still smoldering in his bones.

"Dean?"

There's a breath next to him, or just a ghost of one; then it stops. 

"No," he says, feels the blood-scent thick as oil, "no, no, no."

Salt at the windows. Strings of viburnum stretched over the door.

It's morning, and all the hellhounds are gone, and his brother is dead. 

*****

Grief is a fever, of course. 

Watching teeth tear your own apart is a soul-sickness you’ll never be shed of.

March is a hellhound, of course, and his head’s a howling.

*****

He packs up a bag, sets a map in memory, drives out to the cemetery where he planted his flesh and blood.

“Dean,” he says, but his voice cracks and a crow calls, mocking, from the white oak next to the grave.

 _Start walking, boy, or you’ll find your own,_ a voice says. It sounds a little like Bobby.

He does, takes the road south through the woods, around the developments, between and behind the places where people plant gardens and have children and live and die without knowing there’s a hell. Coyotes yipping. Bedtime stories. Bee balm blooming in backyards where now it’s still midwestern winter, salt-grey and still.

 _Sammy_ , Dean’s vacant-lot voice through the trees, dropped baseballs and macaroni and guns to be cleaned before dad gets home, _time to come in._

 _Sammy_ , on the wind, southwesterly, _go back._

But he binds his brother’s name to his mouth and keeps walking, bootlaces half-undone, knife tight to his side, to a circle of oaks in the woods, which would be, could be, in the fairy tales he read as a kid, a place of magic and power.

“Is this it?” he shouts at the trees.

The crow lands on his shoulder.

 _Christo_ , his blood should say, but it doesn’t.

“You following me?” is what he says.

The crow flaps up to a branch above his head, drops down a shiny object for him to pick up. A key.

“A gift? Is there a price?”

Pain shoots through his eyes, and his veins answer.

“With blood magic, there always is,” the crow says, takes to the air, “you ought to know that by now.”

“Wait,” he calls after. There’s something in the tumbling flight. “Do I know you?”

*****

His legs carry him out of the trees, winter burrs sticking to his clothes; his brother’s darling carries him to bed.

He wakes half-bent over the laptop, splitting head, thin motel door banging and banging.

“You staying another night? ‘Cause if not you got to go.”

“Yeah,” he says, pushes the spellbook off his chest, holds his hand, brain calling to blood, over his aching eyes.

"Better not be making a mess in there,” the man at the door says, as if he knows, knows all, knows what Winchesters leave in their wake.

*****

He walks to the office with the best card, slices it through, goes back to the room and sits down in a dream acrid with coffee, with old-fashioned ink, types:

_Once there were two boys from Kansas who hunted things and bargained in blood._

_One went down to the crossroads; the other went down to the crossroads._

_One went to hell; the other brought him back; one went to hell; the other brought him back._

*****

He doesn’t sleep, watches the last slice of moon fade to dawn, laces up his boots and goes to the woods again, meets the crow eating a dead mouse on an old stump.

“Do I know you?” he says, “because…”

“Not as well as you will,” the crow says, holds out a scrap of stripped tail, “breakfast? You’ve got to keep your strength up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you take what you get and you use what you have. Your gifts, you know, you should use them.”

“I just want my brother back,” he says, “I don’t care about my gifts.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s wrong not to use what you’ve been given,” says the crow, shakes some beaked bark onto his arm, “and I know you want to be good someday.”

*****

_Go back_ , the Bobby-voice says.

 _Go back_ , says Dean’s vacant-lot voice.

He goes back to the motel.

*****

He burns all afternoon. He dreams.

He’s lying on his back in the wood, sunk ear-deep in winter leaves. The sky’s a question; green shoots push at his back.

“Tell me a story,” he says. There are small fingers in his hair, pinning it back against his forehead, letting it settle, twigs and hay, around his face.

_You’ll meet an angel, one day. Don’t believe in him._

_You’ll fall in love with a demon._

_You’ll go to hell._

_You’ll be lost in the wild, and you won’t come back._

“Tell me what to do,” he says.

“Take the key, genius,” the crow says, turns a bright eye down from an oak bough, “and open the book.”

*****

He opens the book.

He opens the book and sets the key on the page and watches it burn a portal to the other story buried there, the other spell.

 _Equinox_ , the spellbook says, _new moon, yarrow; blood, your own; blood, hellhounds._

This isn’t the way he’d write it, but there it is, the future, all war and trial and sacrifice.

Blood calls to blood, is the thing.

“You can hear it in hell?” he says aloud.

“You’d be surprised,” says the crow.

*****

He learns the litany, lies down for an hour with his feet bare and his eyes closed, hand pressed to his heart, parking lot sounds whispers from another world.

He sits up trembling, dresses himself, rolls up his sleeve for the knife, brightens the pain with whiskey and salt.

Mouths a prayer not to god, or gods, to any angel he might someday meet, but to his dead brother.

_Dean, forgive me, always; always forgive me._

He arms himself, the way they do.

*****

To the crossroads you carry yarrow seeds for the future. Box with your heart in it. Cat-bones, one for each of the hounds;blood, your own, more blood, something secret; hood for the cold claws of March. Blade at the ready. _Daemon_ on your tongue.

He turns in the center with the crow on his shoulder, watches the demon appear.

“Hey, sister,” says the crow to the red-eyed beauty with three hounds on a leashes of lightning. Her hair curls light to her waist like waves of grain.

“Ruby,” says the crossroads demon, “slumming it as a psychopomp these days, are we? How Goth of you. And who’s this fine young necromancer?”

“ _Ruby?_ ” he says, catches a glint in the crow’s feathers, “but I thought you were …”

Her claws dig into the thin skin over his scapula, _not now, not now._

“Doesn’t matter who he is,” says the crow to the red-eyed beauty, “we’re here for your dogs.”

“I don’t think so, _sister_.”

“Now!” says the crow.

He says the words, turns three times against the clock, catches the demon’s wrist before the kiss, yanks the leashes loose to a pack of howls.

He cuts the hellhounds throats then, three slicks of the demon knife, one after the other, lets the blood come down on his face, licks it up like rain, like whiskey, like everything ( _trust in his brother’s eyes)_  he’s always wanted.

There’s a scream, sparks on the wind.

“Go,” Ruby shouts, from somewhere, “go now!”

He gets up heavy with liquid, shaking, and he runs.

Sulfur hangs in the air.

A black feather whirls up in the hot wind, lands in his hair. 

*****

He drives back to the motel with a mouthful of iron, the knife held stained to his side.

Graveyard dirt falls from his boots at the door, sluices off bloody, snakeskin-thin, in the shower.

He falls into the bed, sleeps hard against the chill, against the March wind, with a fierce blade in his forehead, in his heavy heart.

Wakes to the click of the door, the smell of diner grease and something else.

“Jesus, Sam, is the headache worse?”

His brother’s breath (no whiskey, just clean and warm and close) drifts over his face.

He starts, sits up so fast the room nearly erases itself, feels new life thrumming, almost, in his own arteries.

Dean’s hand comes up quick, stops to cup his jaw.

“Sam? You in there?”

“Yeah,” he says, blinks at the salt, “I… I’ll write it all down later.”

“What?”

 "I’ll rewrite it, Dean, or I mean I did; I rewrote it, and they’re all dead. And you’re here.”

“Rewrote what? That book of magical contract law you've been mooning over?”

“Yes,” he says, “no,no, not just that, history, you know, time.”

“Right,” Dean says. ( _You’re delirious_ , say his eyebrows.) “Better get some more rest, then.”

“I…”

Dean clicks off the light, lofts a blanket over the bed.

“Just lie down.”

He does.

“Got something in your hair,” Dean says.

*****

Three days later they’ll be on the road again, killing things, holding off the dark and the dread the way they do, barely, telling themselves it’s alright, because it is, because the sky’s bright and hell is far away, and there’s no bargain that can’t be broken.

Three months later he’ll stop, bent double with pain, wonder at what he’s done.

But now it’s dusk in Illinois and his brother is alive, alive, and tomorrow the yarrow will come up at the crossroads and the state will bloom and the country will bloom and the highways will sing, and the birds, and everywhere on earth it’ll be spring.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [The state tree of Illinois](http://www.netstate.com/states/symb/trees/il_white_oak.htm)
> 
>  
> 
> [Viburnum prunifolium, or devil's shoestring](http://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=VIPR)


End file.
